Monday, September 11, 2006

David Taylor registers "johnson4leader" domains

Has Alan Johnson's Internet leadership campaign kicked off? And is it being run by David Taylor of Keeping the Faith fame? A quick look on the Whois database shows that the following domains have all been registered by Taylor in the last week:

"217.22.89.179" is owned by Moving Edge based in Brighton. "156.33.195.33" is owned by the US government and hosted in... the US. Each of the www.jophnson4leader domains linked above resolve to a hosting page belong to a web company from Brighton. Each domain in DNS was regsitered by David Taylor on September 5th. Each domain's records are hosted on the same nameservers in the UK (ns1.domainmonster.com, ns2.domainmonster.com, ns3.domainmonster.com). The US Government does not host domain records on tinpot hosting companies. In fact you cannot even read .gov domain records on the Internet.

The fact that such a redirection has so suddenly been put in, and the fact that they've redirected to the US government, plus the claim that a .co.uk and org.uk have been registered last week on behalf of some obscure US Senator is nonsense.

Someone is clearly panicking.

Update 2: I'm sorry if I make people feel thick. I could spend days talking about DNS and domain names. I used to be a Hostmaster. David Taylor, or whoever it is, picked the wrong person to mess with.

Update 3: I just phoned David Taylor, he sounded unbelievably harrassed as if he's had a lot of phone calls already. When I asked him why he's gone for a simplistic hack to try and mask the reality of the domains he hung up on me.

What we have here is known as Watergate syndrome - the cover up is more damaging than the original story. Given that Taylor appears to have form as a cyber squatter of sorts - gordonbrown.org is or was available to a higher bidder - he could have left the Johnson sites alone and claimed he was just chasing an honest buck. He can't do that now.

Remember also David Taylor ran the Natwatch website which, with the help of his Labour party friends and chronies in the media, caused considerable difficulty for two young north wales men public service workers last year.